Fix violations on the fly

Sonar Eclipse has been designed to help you quickly fix violations as soon as you bump into them.

Fix a violation right away

Go through the Violations view that displays the list of violations of the selected resource (project, file, etc.):

A double-click on a violation opens the source code editor and highlights the violation:

Once a violation has been fixed, you can simply delete it by clicking on the violation icon and then by selecting the "Delete violation" item. Deleting a violation also removes it from the Violations view:

Create a review

If, for any reason, you cannot fix a violation right away but you think that it is valuable to fix it quickly, you can create a review on it.

Manage your quality improvement tasks

The reviews can be browse through the Task List view:

From there, double-clicking on a review open the detail of that review:

All operations on reviews available through the Sonar web interface are also available in Mylyn, so a review can be commented, fixed, reassigned, flagged as false-positive and reopened. Moreover a review can be created directly from the Eclipse source code editor on an existing violation.

Known limitations

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This Mylyn extension has currently the following limitations that should be quickly fixed:

There is no way to create a review that doesn't relate to an existing violation

There is no way to create a Mylyn query with filters in order for instance to retrieve reviews only on a project, or reviews assigned to another user

Check that you are not adding any technical debt in your code

This use case is not fully achievable as Sonar Eclipse does not support differential services yet.

Thus, you do not have yet any way to display violations you just added after running a local analysis.

Run Local Analyses

By default Sonar Eclipse takes care to automatically collect information from the Sonar Web server and decorates the source code on-the-fly. This default behavior is pretty useful as it doesn't consume any CPU or memory on the developer's computer while quickly displaying valuable quality information as soon as a new source file is opened. But if lots of source code is modified locally, quality information available remotely might be desynchronized after a while. In that case, a local quality analysis can be run before committing any changes to the source code repository and with the same quality profile used to analyze the project remotely.

Switching from the remote to the local mode can be done by right-clicking on the the project into the "Package explorer", and then by choosing "Configure -> Sonar -> Analyse -> Locally". As soon as this mode is selected a local analysis is launched to update Violations and Measures views.Later, at any time, you can run a new local analysis by choosing "Configure -> Sonar -> Run Local Analysis.

Be Careful

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Even in local mode, the Hotspots and Web views still display remote data.

The Eclipse Sonar Perspective

Sonar Eclipse provides one Eclipse perspective and four Eclipse views. Those Eclipse views can of course be used outside the "Sonar" Eclipse perspective, but this tutorial describes the default "Sonar" Eclipse perspective layout.

The Measures View

The Measures view allows to gather all available measures on the selected ressource. Most of the time, developers focus their attention on only a few metrics like complexity, uncovered lines of code by unit tests, duplicated lines, ... and want to get a quick overview on those metrics. That's why favourite metrics are displayed on the top of the Measures view. Adding or Removing a metric from the favourites list is possible by right clicking on the metric name:

The Violations View

The Violations view displays the list of violations of the selected resource (project, file, etc.):

The Hotspots View

The Hotspots view allows to quickly identify hotspots on files according to favourite metrics (defined in the Measures view). You can for instance look at files with the greatest number of duplicated lines, greatest number of violations, greatest number of uncovered lines by unit tests...

The Web View

The Web view displays the web Sonar dashboard (for projects and packages) or the web Sonar ressource viewer (for files). This web page can be used to access information and services (cloud, treemap, ...) that are not yet natively available in Sonar Eclipse: